PREFACE.
The Manuscript of this Volume, put together in a rough draft amid ceaseless and exacting toils, was placed in my hands and left absolutely to my disposal by my beloved brother, the Missionary.
It has been to me a labour of perfect love to re-write and revise the same, pruning here and expanding there, and preparing the whole for the press. In the incidents of personal experience, constituting the larger part of the book, the reader peruses in an almost unaltered form the graphic and simple narrative as it came from my brother’s pen. But, as many sections have been re-cast and largely modified, especially in those Chapters of whose events I was myself an eye-witness, or regarding which I had information at first hand from the parties concerned therein,—and as circumstances make it impossible to submit these in their present shape to my brother before publication,—I must request the Public to lay upon me, and not on him, all responsibility for the final shape in which the Autobiography appears.
I publish it, because Something tells me there is a blessing in it.
January, 1889. James Paton.